He Gave A Cry
by Sorrow Personified
Summary: (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) Awaiting his lobotomy, Mack thinks back to his stay on the ward, the Nurse, the patients - one patient in particular. McMurphy's monologue.


"All of us together couldn't stop him. We couldn't stop him because we were the ones making him do it. It was us that had been making him go on for weeks, keeping him standing long after his feet and legs had given out, weeks of making him wink and grin and laugh and go on with his act long after his humour had been parched dry between two electrodes." 

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest 

*

I've seen a lot of blood in my time.

I've seen about a million boys and men beat up to the point where you can't tell their head from their ass. I've seen some weathered old coons with scars in 'em deep enough to hold a river. I've got bruises and cuts and goddamn scars criss-crossing pretty much all of my body, courtesy of about every sonofabitch whoever held a beer in any bar in America. I've gotten insults and threats and words thrown at me that 'ud melt a man into water, right on the spot.

I've seen a lot of blood in my time, but Billy Bibbit's was enough to cut me me so I'm bleeding myself.

'Course, I s'pose I'm no authority on Mister Bibbit, but I'm just about as fucking miserable as can be, son. So I'll try'n recount to you exactly my personal, guaranteed honest thoughts on the situation 'fore one of them 'cursed tarbabies come back with that jar of Vaseline and that thermometer. I'm not exactly very, uh, literate, after they stick that thermometer where the sun don't shine, if you know what I mean and will 'scuse me saying so.

*

Now, as I start, I'm gonna take the blame for one thing; it was solely, a hundred percent, utterly myself, and only myself, whose bright idea it was have that little, uh, fracas downstairs. Now, t'wasn't all bad, in my humble opinion, because even Hard-on got a kick or two, which I took as a personal triumph. 

We were drinking as heavy as we could, y'know, making cocktails with booze and cherry cough syrup, in fact, making cocktails with booze and just about everything we could get our hands on. Hooee, boy, it was a blast and a half, and though those loons wouldn't be my first choice drinkin' buddies, I made do, and, hey, at the very least, it was an experience. 

Yeah, it was a decent soiree, and the ward and its patients didn't know whether they'd been hit by a bus or a goddamn earthquake. It was neither, my friend, it was old Bull Goose Loony Randle Patrick McMurphy, and good old R.P McMurphy never goes out without a bang. And I came damn close to my bang, lemme tell you.

I'm at the window, y'know, keys in hand, badin' my goodbyes to the patients, me shaking hands and they shaking heads, when the first blow was hit. I shake Cheswick's hand and look up for Billy Bibbit, the only patient I haven't yet said goodbye to. There he is, standing way at the back, hiding in the shadows. So I start, o'course, I don't want to leave the boy without shaking his goddamn hand, so I go after him and the child runs away from me. He runs away from me, for christsake. So I get him then, in a corner by a table and I ask him what's the matter. Now he says "Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nothing." Now, of course there's something wrong, people don't usually run away from old Mack 'less I give 'em a reason, so I ask him again and he tells me that he'll miss me very much. But there's more to it, and that sly little dog, Billy the Club, Billy of the famous fourteen inches, is locked in the seclusion room with Miss Candy sooner than you can say "Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-no." Now I reckon that either Candy or Billy is going to have to learn something, so I tell Hard-on to wake me up in an hour.

Does he?

No.

So I'm still asleep at six when the black boys come in, and in the morning light the sight of eighteen hammered loons ain't exactly pretty. So Sefelt and Fredrickson have their beds pushed together, which causes a bit of alarm and disgust between the black boys, Scanlon has his feet hooked at sweet Rose's head as they both sleep on a bench, Chief is slumped in a corner, Taber's passed out in the middle of the floor, even old Colonel Matterson is still a bit liqeured up. So our sweet angel of mercy, our darling saint, our rectified, ready-to-be-canonized, savior of the whole goddamn world, Nurse Mildred Ratched, walks in through those doors and I know that my chances of escaping have plummeted to near-nil. 

And I don't know what came over me just then, but for the first time in my whole stay here at the ward, I felt near frightened of that Nurse. It might've been the way that baby-doll's smile stayed just as it was as she looked over her precious ward, it stayed like that thin line of red-orange, that unearthly shade, and I reckon that Satan himself stole the colour from his fires and painted her talons and lips with it. But she stayed the same as she always did; looking over us like you'd look over a plot of land. So I push myself up against the wall and cover my eyes with my cap, because the light coming in through the window is enough to blind a man, no less a man half in the realm of drunkenness and all too painfully in the realm of hangover. 

Ratched tells the black boys to get us up and they do just that, and before long we're a squinting, moaning, yawning bunch in the middle of the day room. I'm rubbing my eyes when the Nurse asks us,

"Did Billy Bibbit leave the grounds of the hospital last night?"

Then we're a squinting, moaning, yawning, giggling bunch. Taber throws me a grin and I return it. Someone mutters, "In a way."

Before long the black boys find Billy and Candy still locked up in the seclusion room, and there's a few real mean glances thrown at the two before Ratched sees the, uh, happy couple. She turns on her way after a quick look, walking straight down at us, that baby-doll face total calm and as white as snow. The seclusion room door bangs open and Billy bursts his way out, literally stumbling into his trousers. He catches up to Ratched and she stops and loks him over. There's a roar of laughter from the patients and he looks at us, a wide grin spread across his face. He looks then at Ratched, and blushes, looking down to tie the cord of his trousers.

"I c-can explain eh-everything." He says quietly, a lot of the grin still on his face while he fumbles with his cord.

"Please do." Ratched says. Billy looks up sharply, first at her, then at us, at me.

"Eh-everything?"

He's smiling more now, and there's some more laughter.

Ratched, without blinking one of those snowdrop 'lids, says calmly

"Aren't you ashamed?"

Billy hardens, looks her straight in those icy eyes.

"No, I'm not."

Just like that. Without so much as a frigging pause, no mind a stutter. We all applaud; it's Billy's victory. He smiles round at us, pleased as punch. 

But Ratched, that bitch, she doesn't miss a beat. She gets real put out when her puppets break loose of their strings. 

"You know, Billy, what worries me is how your mother is going to take this."

You can see it in his face, Billy's weak again, she's just torn off his shell and he's crawlin' about, a hermit crab without his skin, blind and pale and weak for all the world to see.

Well, I s'pose you know what happens. The boy turned me in, but he couldn't help it. She'd ripped out his backbone. They took him away, kicking and screaming to that little Doctor Spivey's office and Ratched goes to the phone. 

For a moment there's no-one looking over the ward and I still have Turkle's keys in my pocket. I figure it's probably my last chance. So I open the mesh and push up the window, but before I can get so much as a toe out of it, Washington's behind me, that bastard. I'm real angry now, so I throw a fist at him that'd launch a ship. 'Fore he can get properly to his feet there's a scream and it's little Nurse Pilbow, falling out of Spivey's office and onto Ratched. 

There's blood on the shoulder of her starched uniform. 

Jesus, I think to myself, what if it's Billy?

By now all the Acutes and half the Chronics are all around Spivey's office, and I can either jump out the window and go on my very merry way with Rose and Candy, or I can go and see what the fuck's wrong in the office.

Y'know, in times of, uh, crisis, I usually loose my head and do things that I later regret.

This wasn't one of them times.

I beat my way through the patients 'till I have a clear view…and Jesus Christ, there lies Billy.

S'probably the only real clear image I can recall from that day. Billy's all twisted, y'know, bare-chested and pale and head to one side. In his right hand there was a piece of broken glass, red all 'long it's edge, and his hand was stained with his own blood. There was a neat red line cross his neck, so tidy and small that you could almost reckon someone drew it there with a felt-tip. Then, all by his head there was a puddle of blood, so bright I didn't know what it was at first. I didn't know that so much blood could pour from such a thin, white neck.

Ratched pushes her way through and gasps, falls to her knees beside Billy and orders us out. We're not laughing now; we'd all noticed the scars on Billy's wrists before, but didn't think he'd actually do nothing.

Big Nurse comes out and says a few words, so calm and so quiet that I can't hear her, she's so calm and she's so quiet that I'm angry, for fuck's sake, there's a boy in there dead. 

I can't help myself. I s'pose it's my "psychopathic tendencies."

I launch myself at her and knock her to the floor, my hands finally on her neck. I wraps my hands around her neck until my fingers are almost touching, my thumbs pressing in, pressing in a bit more, searchin' out her neck-bone or anything that I can so's that I can wring the life out of this machine… 

I feel a blow to my neck and back, and I don't remember any more.

*

When I wake up, I'm in here, and that's where my story ends, I s'pose. They've told I've been in Disturbed for three days, I can only remember today and half of yesterday, but I reckon they gave me a good million watts more of electricity through my head for good measure. Probably shoved a couple of pills down my throat, too.

I been in this hospital for three months, and I don't expect I'll see the end of the fourth month. The real clincher's that it's been the best place I've ever stayed. The best, I s'pose, and the worst. There's something 'bout it that just doesn't seem right, like it was all written before, all timed like a dance, like clockwork. You get what I'm saying, right? Like Ratched writes up her own schedule the day before, On November the eighteenth, blah blah blah blah. It's like I said; a giant puppet show, a play, an opera. Everyone was scripted.

Not anymore.

I'm damn proud of those boys.

*

But I'm not sure what's gonna happen to me; I don't reckon anyone's been up in Disturbed this long that gets to go back downstairs. The Nurses are no help, "You'll be fine, Mister McMurphy." "No-one is going to hurt you, Mister McMurphy." 

So I asked the black boys and they grinned at me, those pearly teeth lookin' absolutely evil, and they says to each other, fake whispering behind their hands "Dey'se have old Mack in fo' a head job, righ'?" "Dat is righ', fo' a lobotomy." "Hack the brains righ' outta dat sonofabitch." Fake sniggering.

So I don't suppose I'm gonna go out with a bang at all if they get their own way. 

But I'll make sure that I get my way. Good old R.P McMurphy never leaves a place without a kick, and I'll be goddamned if I don't this time.

*

"Only then did he show any sign that he might be anything other than a sane, wilful, dogged man performing a hard duty that finally just had to be done, like it or not.

He gave a cry. At the last, falling backwards, his face appearing to us for a second upside down before he was smothered on the floor by a pile of white uniforms, he let himself cry out.

A sound of cornered animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance, that if you ever trailed coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and failing animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn't care anymore about anything but himself and his dying." 

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

~*~


End file.
